Clutter-Robust Vision-Language-Action Models through Object-Centric and Geometry Grounding
Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have made impressive progress toward general-purpose robotic manipulation by post-training large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for action prediction. Yet most VLAs entangle perception and control in a monolithic pipeline optimized purely for action, which can erode language-conditioned grounding. In our real-world tabletop tests, policies over-grasp when the target is absent, are distracted by clutter, and overfit to background appearance. To address these issues, we propose OBEYED-VLA (OBject-centric and gEometrY groundED VLA), a framework that explicitly disentangles perceptual grounding from action reasoning. Instead of operating directly on raw RGB, OBEYED-VLA augments VLAs with a perception module that grounds multi-view inputs into task-conditioned, object-centric, and geometry-aware observations. This module includes a VLM-based object-centric grounding stage that selects task-relevant object regions across camera views, along with a complementary geometric grounding stage that emphasizes the 3D structure of these objects over their appearance. The resulting grounded views are then fed to a pretrained VLA policy, which we fine-tune exclusively on single-object demonstrations collected without environmental clutter or non-target objects. On a real-world UR10e tabletop setup, OBEYED-VLA substantially improves robustness over strong VLA baselines across four challenging regimes and multiple difficulty levels: distractor objects, absent-target rejection, background appearance changes, and cluttered manipulation of unseen objects. Ablation studies confirm that both semantic grounding and geometry-aware grounding are critical to these gains. Overall, the results indicate that making perception an explicit, object-centric component is an effective way to strengthen and generalize VLA-based robotic manipulation.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Efficient Alignment of Unconditioned Action Prior for Language-conditioned Pick and Place in Clutter
We study the task of language-conditioned pick and place in clutter, where a robot should grasp a target object in open clutter and move it to a specified place. Some approaches learn end-to-end policies with features fr…
Zero-shot GeneralizationPoint What You Mean: Visually Grounded Instruction Policy
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models align vision and language with embodied control, but their object referring ability remains limited when relying solely on text prompt, especially in cluttered or out-of-distribution (…
Visual GroundingAdaClearGrasp: Learning Adaptive Clearing for Zero-Shot Robust Dexterous Grasping in Densely Cluttered Environments
In densely cluttered environments, physical interference, visual occlusions, and unstable contacts often cause direct dexterous grasping to fail, while aggressive singulation strategies may compromise safety. Enabling ro…
Zero-shot GeneralizationReinforcement LearningTANGO: Humanoid Navigation in Cluttered Environments with a Whole-Body Vision-Language-Action Model
We study the problem of navigating cluttered indoor environments with a humanoid robot. Unlike conventional methods that model navigation as a 2D path planning problem, humanoid traversal in cluttered environments requir…
Vision-Language NavigationLENS: LLM-guided Environment Simplification for Planning and Control in Clutter
Despite recent advances in general-purpose robotic manipulation, real-world multi-object clutter remains challenging to handle for today's prevalent approaches. The problem scales in complexity due to more objects and co…